BioPartnering Executive Summary - 3.qxd - Medical Device Daily

cultivate the environment of innovation that currently is the almost-exclusive territory of biotech.
These companies are changing their management, R&D agendas, investment objectives and even
the way they refer to themselves, as they willingly and unabashedly reinvent themselves in the
image of their junior counterpart market.
Well, the more pharma companies seek to shed their proper pharmaceutical corporate trade names
and insist on a.k.a. designations such as “biopharmaceutical,” “biotherapeutics,” “drug development,”
“bioscience,” “health care,” or anything other than their “pharma” surnames, the more it
signals a shift in the rise of biotechnology’s regard, clout, value and deed. This does not signal the
downfall of the pharmaceutical industry, rather the mutually constructive integration of the two
markets into a therapeutic and financial entity that can exploit, manage and facilitate therapeutic
innovation from concept through commercialization.
That process has traditionally been divided between the two industries, with biotech doing the
front-end brainwork in academia and early-stage to create and develop unique therapeutics, and
pharma using its resources arsenal to do the heavy lifting on the back end to deliver marketable
products. This biopartnership archetype that exploits the strengths of all components is defining
the new face of an integrated drug development market that will produce the therapeutics of the
twenty-first century.
This progressive confluence is seeing each side engage in and, consequently, become more proficient
in each other’s strong suit, as the bigger, and even some mid-sized, biotechs increasingly commercialize
their own products with little or no Big Pharma help, while Big Pharma evermore gets
involved in the earlier phases of the drug development cycle, as competition for late-stage therapeutic
programs intensifies.
Even so, it may be unwarranted to criticize Big Pharma’s precautious approach, considering its tactic
of selectivity in waiting for a technology or clinical trial to reach its “safest bet” stage has
afforded it the ability to avoid being burned by the failure of others as much as, say, its counterparts
in the traditional VC community.
On the other hand, pharma’s reluctance to embrace early-stage deals leaves that opportunity open
for alternatives to Big Pharma’s financing, such as nonprofits and individual investors.
In spite of spotting the pharmaceutical industry a century-long head start in drug development, it
is conceivable that the biotechnology therapeutics market could surpass pharma’s record of curing
disease within a period as soon as the next decade. Such a feat would be primarily attributable to
the many never-before-seen, but imminently on-the-market (as projected by BioWorld analysis)
technologies and products developed from the pipelines of biotech companies, and also from the
pharma entities that are capitalizing on the biopartnering opportunities that are now available.
Biopartnering’s Big Challenge Could Be Big Pharma’s Impatience
The foremost challenges to the continuation of the biopartnering trend will not be posed by financial
or innovation shortages, but will be most prone to result from the impatience of Big Pharma
THE BIOWORLD BIOPARTNERING REPORT 2009
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